Is there? What exactly is the difference?
If you retain a contractor, you're one of their clients and any improvements they make to their business benefits you.
If an employee on your payroll starts a business, they're not doing so with your best interest in mind and their work's focus will change accordingly.
Ah...I see. You're looking for employees whose primary interest is enriching your life, not what's in it for them. Good luck with that.
There will in theory come a time when my side efforts will require effort enough to get in the way of my regular job, which is in fact the goal, but I have the integrity to face that -- and when I reach that stage, I'll leave the regular job.
If you're running a small business where everyone working for you has to put in 80-hour weeks in order to keep up with their work, then the fault is yours for your poor management -- though to be honest, I'd never consider working for you just because of your attitude toward your ownership of me.
Get it straight: you don't own your employees, period. What they do when they're on the clock is your business. Everything else is not. If you can't get that through your head, you shouldn't be attempting to run a business that requires employees. That's not an opinion, it's actually law -- don't forget, we abolished slavery.
Fuck. That. Shit.
Everyone is a contractor. There is no loyalty on either side of the employer-employee relationship. It is a hurtful delusion to harbor fantasies otherwise.
Judge an employee on their performance. Nothing more, nothing less.
What happens off the clock is none of your business. Literally.
I'm still waiting to read of even a single example of a full-time employee who is working on (not preparing for) a business of their own while collecting a full-time salary. If it's such an awesome thing, there must be dozens of examples to choose from, right?
Why the silence? Because that employment arrangement does not work, and any person running their own full-time business would know why.
Working as a contractor while getting your business up and running? Great! That'll work fine.
Working as a full-time employee while starting a business? Doesn't work.
If you walk the talk and start your own company, you'll understand why you wouldn't want to be paying a person out of your own pocket while they're going through that process.
Joshua Schachter, Delicious. It's rare, but not unheard-of.
Quit worrying about what this employee can or can't do. Pay attention to what he does or doesn't do.
You're an entrepreneur or you're an employee. You cannot mix the two, and if you find the pills to start a business yourself you'll understand why.